We welcome new members! Please get in touch to join us.
https://www.milltheatre.ie/what-we-do/community/the-elders/
We are a group of creative over 65 year olds that initially responded to a call out for the DLRCOCO commissioned project Life Memos in 2018. We have all had varied careers and are now committed to creating original and innovative theatre.
We have trained with Andrea in movement improvisation, creative composition, contemporary drama, contemporary performance companies and the playwright Teresa Deevy.
For Life Memos we wrote monologues of a moment in our lives and we developed movement material that weaved these texts together. The piece was performed in dlr Mill in June 2018 to a full house and the Minister for the Arts Josepha Madigan.
Doone of the Drumes, the next project was site specific promenade piece around Dundrum Village in which we performed characters of the area that we researched and re imagined.
Elders (our own) the show explored our own grandparents and moments of importance in their lives which we wrote into scenes and played our own grandparents.
On our own initiative regarding funding we have now thrice received community group funding from DLRCOCO previously for theatre education sessions that Andrea facilitates and currently for acting masterclasses with Liam Halligan. In 2019 we looked at play texts and productions and this year for 8 weeks we study innovative performance company’s and how they make work and for another 8 weeks we study Teresa Deevy’s life and plays.
In 2022 we showed a work in progress in the forest in Killruddery to an invited audience which was a wonderful and rich experience and in 2023 we performed over three evenings in the forest ‘a third of an inch per second’ to a sold out audience and great response. We are always co-creators generating material and involved at every stage. We have grown in number this Autumn and are now 18 members strong. We have been working with Andrea and Michelle Read on writing a play about playwright Teresa Deevy and on another project with Andrea on writing in our own Beckettian style.
We are excited to continue working with nature and performance and to now delve into endangered birds.
The Elders 2023
Aileen O’Connor, Brendan Supple, Eithne Casey, Nuala O’Connell, Margaret Casey, David Ingoldsby, Andrew Parkes, Eimear Berry, Ted Morrissey, Shabnam Vashist, Nuala O’Connell, Orlagh O’Farrell, Angela O’Rourke, Irene Gunning, Ruth Weldon, Mary Cate Kelly, Ann Shaw Fahey